Take time to grieve

Take time to grieve

1of2Flowers hang from a Virgin de Guadalupe statue in on All Souls Day.Photo: William Luther, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

2of2grief, gravePhoto: Adrienne Bresnahan, Contributor / Getty Images

We all experience grief. And yet, we all grieve in our own ways and in our own time. From decades of study and millennia of experience, some general patterns of grief have been identified, yet grief remains deeply personal.

There is no right way to grieve. There is no timetable. Grief is about coming to terms with the fact that things will never be the same again. Something is lost and is never coming back. Grief can be caused by the death of a family member or friend, divorce, disability, diagnosis, aging, infertility, retirement, moving, the loss of financial stability, the loss of a long-held belief, the death of a pet, and the list could go on and on.

Grief is with us every day. But so often our suffering and pain are expressed only privately. As a minister, I am often with people who are mourning. The fear I hear expressed most is that something is wrong with the person grieving.

Our culture often has little patience with suffering, with pain, with loss. You might get one day off or perhaps even a week after a family member dies but then you are expected to get back to normal. Only your normal has forever changed. These days of the dead give us the opportunity for public mourning. They help us to know we are not alone. And if we allow them, they help us to see others who are suffering and to respond with compassion.

As we celebrate Halloween — followed by All Saints Day and All Souls Day, remember these are days set aside for remembering our departed loved ones.

We need these days of the dead because we need to acknowledge our pain. So often we use work, TV, alcohol, comfort food, shopping, busy-ness to keep going when what we need to do is stop, light a candle, cry, call a friend, sit with our pain and respond to ourselves and each other with compassion. We have fostered a national inability to deal with pain of any kind. As with private loss, our national losses are given a brief window in the twenty-four hour news cycle, and then we are expected to move on.

The day after Easter, our city was shaken when six Houstonians died in a plane crash. Our local news was full of their faces for a day or two while those of us who knew those six people are forever changed by grief. We have found ways to keep moving through our days, to keep breathing in and out, to do the dishes and drop the kids off at school and we are grieving. Grief becomes part of our living.

Just as the person lives on in our memories and love so too the grief becomes part of who we are now. It is perhaps human nature to try to avoid such pain. To tell ourselves and each other to “move on” or “get over it.” But in my experience that’s not how it works.

Staying with pain and suffering is hard but denying it or running from it will not make it better. Seeing our pain and each other’s pain, sharing it, being in community, finding ways to turn toward the suffering, to bear witness to our broken hearts with loving kindness, this is how we live with pain and loss.

Just two months ago, our country experienced two mass shootings within 24 hours; 53 people died in mass shootings in August alone. We have just marked one year since the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States. The news cycle has moved on but for those who come home to an empty house, who no longer have a child to tuck in at night, who will never know the embrace of their mother or father, they live their grief every day. We do them and ourselves a disservice when we turn away; shut our eyes and ears to their wailing.

Grief changes us. People are dying in Syria. We grieve. People seeking asylum are suffering. At least 24 people have died in ICE custody over the past three years. Others are sick, dehydrated, traumatized, separated from their parents or their children. We grieve. An African-American woman was shot in her home by police. We grieve. A Harris County deputy is shot. We grieve. The fires in California and the rainforests of Brazil are causing massive devastation. We grieve. We wound each other with racism, sexism and heterosexism. We grieve.

We experience so much loss, but we do not allow ourselves to grieve together. Our national losses are overwhelming: war, poverty, gun violence, global warming. Yet, there are almost no communal expressions of mourning, of pain, of suffering. And so this year, after we have cleared away the Halloween decorations, let’s pause, and allow ourselves time and space to grieve.

You might light a candle, you might write in a journal, you might call a trusted friend. You might consider those you know who have experienced the death of a loved one this year and as an expression of your own grief, you might write them a note, call them, say the name of the person who died and acknowledge the pain of absence.

When we are unwilling to acknowledge our personal pain and loss, we are even less able to acknowledge the suffering of others. We put up barriers between ourselves and others in an effort to protect ourselves. We believe lies to escape the pain of what our own eyes and the testimonies of those who are there are telling us. This denial of the realities of what bigotry and racism and hatred are doing in our country will not keep the suffering at bay. In fact, they will exacerbate it. However, when we acknowledge suffering, when we see the suffering of others, we allow ourselves to be transformed into more compassionate people. This takes an intentional willingness to get outside the busyness of shopping lists and soccer practice, a willingness to be vulnerable.

When we allow ourselves to experience our own suffering, to see and acknowledge the suffering of others, we are changed. One change we might experience is the deep knowledge that we are not alone. We are surrounded by our great cloud of witnesses — those who have impacted our journeys and helped to create the people we are becoming. We are surrounded by fellow travelers on our journey, many of whom are themselves grieving. In our sharing, we surround ourselves with a love that can never die.